Month: October 2017

Good article at the Mises Institute from Rafael Acevedo, a Professor at Universidad Centro Lisandro Alvarado in Venezuela. The only shocking thing is that people are surprised by this. Socialism is a political system that begins with theft and ends with murder. Always.

In order to understand the disaster that is unfolding in Venezuela, we need to journey through the most recent century of our history and look at how our institutions have changed over time. What we will find is that Venezuela once enjoyed relatively high levels of economic freedom, although this occurred under dictatorial regimes.

But, when Venezuela finally embraced democracy, we began to kill economic freedom. This was not all at once, of course. It was a gradual process. But it happened at the expense of the welfare of millions of people.

And, ultimately, the lesson we learned is that socialism never, ever works, no matter what Paul Krugman, or Joseph Stiglitz, or guys in Spain like Pablo Iglesias say.

It was very common during the years we suffered under Hugo Chávez to hear these pundits and economists on TV saying that this time, socialism is being done right. This time, the Venezuelans figured it out.

They were, and are wrong.

On the other hand, there was a time when this country was quite prosperous and wealthy, and for a time Venezuela was even referred to as an “economic miracle” in many books and articles.

However, during those years, out of the five presidents we had, four were dictators and generals of the army. Our civil and political rights were restricted. We didn’t have freedom of the press, for example; we didn’t have universal suffrage. But, while we lived under a dictatorship, we could at least enjoy high levels of economic freedom.

In a recent speech at Liberty University, author Dinesh D’Souza gave a nice summation of the theme of his new book, “The Big Lie.” In the book he painstakingly demonstrates something everyone should already know: fascism — just like socialism and communism — is a phenomenon of the political left and primarily driven by the Democrat party in the United States. Socialism, communism, and fascism are all simply different flavors of collectivism. The real battle is between individualism (freedom and limited government) vs. collectivism (tyranny and big government).

The video of the speech is below and it’s well worth watching because he very concisely covers the history and also demonstrates how it relates to our current political climate and the anti-Trump hysteria of the left.